


Five Forks

by AngelQueen



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Reality, Friendship, Gen, five things, team fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-11
Updated: 2011-04-11
Packaged: 2017-10-17 23:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelQueen/pseuds/AngelQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five alternate realities that Elizabeth Weir visited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Forks

**Author's Note:**

> Won 'Best Elizabeth Weir Gen Story' in the 2007 Stargate Fan Awards.
> 
> Disclaimer: SGA does not belong to me.

1\. _Apocalypse_

She had seen the Gate room in various stages of damage before; this should be no different. But somehow, it was. The walls were blackened from weapons’ fire, metal beams had been melted and twisted horribly, and there were dark spots scattered all over the floor made by substances she did not wish to consider too closely. The entire room reeked of death.

Elizabeth shivered as she followed John and Ronon up the steps with Teyla and Rodney behind her. She could sense their confusion, their horror.

“Somehow,” John said, as they stepped up on the landing and moved toward the shattered window, “I don’t think this is home.”

“Oh thank you, Captain Obvious!” Rodney snapped. He might have continued his tirade, but Elizabeth didn’t listen to him. She stared out the window overlooking Atlantis. Or what was left of Atlantis, that is. The buildings that had not been obliterated completely were now only shattered skeletons of their previously glorious incarnations.

“What happened here?” Elizabeth vaguely heard Teyla ask.

“I don’t know,” Rodney replied and Elizabeth turned to see that he had moved into the control room and was bending over the consoles. As she approached, she saw him wrinkle his nose. “There’s hardly any power left,” he told them. “From what I can tell, the ZPM’s almost completely depleted.”

“Is there enough to make a jump and get us home?” John asked.

“Maybe.”

Rodney continued to mutter, but most of what he said went over her head. Eventually, Elizabeth found herself wandering across the bridge and into her office, or was it her other self’s office? Or perhaps it belonged to someone else entirely? It was possible that the expedition of this reality had a different leader altogether.

She stood in the doorway and glanced around before nodding to herself. It was definitely her office. Some of the damaged art pieces were different than the ones in her office at home, but she still recognized them as pieces from her own collection on Earth. Her other self must have brought them instead. Elizabeth glanced down in front of the desk. There, lying completely shattered on the floor, were the fragments of the Athosian urn John had given her on her first birthday in Atlantis.

Slowly, as though attempting not to disturb the settled tension, she moved around the desk. In the center of the desk, covered in a thick layer of dirt and dust, was a familiar-looking laptop. Curious, Elizabeth opened it up and tried to activate it. Much to her surprise, it still worked. It only took a few moments to boot up, just as hers did, and she quickly discovered that the files had been organized in much the same system she used on her own laptop.

Clicking into the audio file, she saw that there were several reports, each marked by their dates. Picking the last one on the list, she opened it. Within seconds, the sound of her voice filled the room, albeit faint and static-filled.

 _“… the… coming in from all directions… completely surrounded the planet. We… evacuated the… DHD out of commission… Sheppard’s dead… coming!”_

The laptop lost power at that point and the screen went black, leaving Elizabeth standing there in a silence that seemed even colder than it did before.

She shivered. Suddenly, she didn’t feel at all curious anymore. She wanted to go home.

* * *

2\. _Military_

Elizabeth sat at an interrogation table, staring at Jack O’Neill. Jack O’Neill stared back.

“Well,” he said slowly, “this is fun.”

She nodded. “It is, isn’t it?”

“I thought so.”

Silence fell over them for several moments until Jack broke it again.

“So, you’re from an alternate reality? I’ve been to one of those. Weird stuff.”

She nodded. “Yes, and where I come from, I command Atlantis.”

And she had never expected to come through the Gate to find an Atlantis where General Jack O’Neill commanded a military expedition with Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell as his second in command. Though, she had to admit, she was curious about where the rest of SG-1 was. Teal’c? Doctor Jackson? Colonel Carter? Vala Mal Doran?

“Nice,” Jack replied, “and you and your team are trolling through different realities for what? A joyride?”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “No,” she retorted. “We discovered some research in our database left behind by the Ancients. While we were performing our experiments, we were also negotiating with a people known as the Ankarians. On our return, there was an accident in our Gate’s systems. It sent us through to an alternate reality. We have been attempting to return to our own, but we have so far been unable to identify our own reality so that we may connect with our Gate.”

The general nodded slowly. “Uh huh,” he muttered vaguely. “That might be what McKay told me, but apparently it’s a constant across the realities that I understand less than one percent of what he says half the time.”

“It must be,” she agreed. “So, any chance you can help us out here, General? We’d really like to return home. Especially before temporal entropic cascade failure sets in, which could be at any time now, given that we’ve been here longer than we normally are in any one reality.”

Jack stood up. “We’ll see what we can do for you, Doc. I may even put a call into the SGC and see if I can get them to loan us a few brainiacs to help us out. My ex-wife will probably be willing for this project.” He gestured toward the door, so Elizabeth stood up as well and moved toward it.

“Your ex-wife?” she asked distractedly as she glanced around, looking for her team.

“Yeah,” Jack told her. “You. Or, your other self. Whatever.”

Elizabeth stopped dead. “What?”

* * *

3\. _Departed_

“This is really getting old,” Rodney complained, his tone distinctly high-pitched.

Elizabeth couldn’t help but agree. She was rather tired of stepping through the Stargate and finding herself on the wrong end of Wraith stunners and P-90s.

“I _knew_ that _idiot_ wouldn’t get it right,” the scientist continued to rant as several Marines disarmed the group.

“He was your alternate self, you know,” John pointed out wryly.

“And he was completely incompetent! How he has a job with Stargate Command I’ll… never… know…” he trailed off and Elizabeth watched his eyes go wide as he stared toward the stairs. She followed his gaze and froze.

Striding confidently down the steps, his grey eyes hard and wary, was Marshall Sumner; alive and showing no signs of having been fed on by the Wraith. And he was staring directly at John.

John. Elizabeth whirled her head quickly to stare at him. His expression was inscrutable, but she had come to know the man well enough to know when John was masking his emotions. He appeared completely at ease, standing in front of the Gate with the utmost casualness.

She still saw the tension around his eyes, however.

“Sheppard?” Sumner spoke first. “John Sheppard? What… how the hell is this even possible?” He demanded.

Elizabeth opened her mouth, intending to intervene, but as usual, John’s smart mouth beat her to the punch. “I would ask the same thing, but I’ve gone through this too many times already, so I’ll just let McKay handle it.”

“Oh thanks so very, very much,” Rodney muttered irritably, glaring at the other man.

Elizabeth watched as Sumner’s head whirled and he took them in, as though noticing them for the first time. “Doctor Weir,” he greeted her slowly, and then nodded to the others. “Teyla, Doctor McKay, Ronon. What’s going on here?”

“I’m afraid, Colonel, that we are not exactly who we appear to be,” Elizabeth explained. “We are not the people you know.” She quickly started laying everything out for him, hoping to avoid being stuck in the isolation rooms like she had in the last reality.

“I see,” Sumner said at length. “Well, then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have our people confirm your claims. These men,” he gestured to the Marines, who were still watching them carefully, “will escort you down to the infirmary to see Doctor Lam.” And as abruptly as he came, he was gone.

The group was ushered into the side corridors off the Gate room. As they walked, Ronon asked, “Who was that?”

At first, no one answered him, and Elizabeth found herself glancing at John once more. He still had not lost his affable appearance, but that did not reassure her all that much. Luckily, Rodney saved the colonel from having to answer Ronon.

“That was Colonel Marshall Sumner,” the scientist said. “He was the original leader of the military contingent when we first came out here looking for Atlantis. There was, um, well, some bad stuff happened when we made contact with Teyla’s people.”

“There was a Wraith attack not long after their arrival,” Teyla continued the story. “The colonel, several of his men, me, and a number of my people were taken by Wraith darts. Colonel Sheppard led a rescue and got nearly all of us out. Colonel Sumner was not one of them.”

And after that, no one said anything for a while, which left Elizabeth to analyze what she had gleaned from Sumner’s expression. It wasn’t much, really, only that his gaze had lingered rather overtly on John. Indeed, he had been rather shocked to see him.

Something cold settled into Elizabeth’s stomach and she tried not to shiver.

* * *

4\. _Perfect?_

“I don’t believe this!” Rodney breathed. “It’s amazing!”

John looked around, distinctly impressed. “I’ll say.”

Elizabeth also agreed. Though her alternate self in this reality still insisted on a Marine escort, she had permitted them to walk around and explore Atlantis. An Atlantis powered by three fully charged ZPMs.

Looking out the window and seeing the entire city lit up more brightly than she had ever seen was an amazing experience. This is what Atlantis had looked like in its prime, when the Ancients still inhabited it.

Its beauty was… beyond any words she could find.

Elizabeth turned away from the window when she heard Rodney exclaim yet again over some other marvel up in the control room. She watched him all but demand that the technicians let him have access, watched John, Ronon, and Teyla watch Rodney with amusement.

Watched her other self watch the four of them with a wistful expression on her face.

Elizabeth quietly walked over to join her other self where she was standing on the bridge leading to her office. Normally, she felt uncomfortable when confronted with situations like this, seeing herself and all of the ‘what might have been’ possibilities. But there was something in this woman’s eyes…

“Just like children, aren’t they?” she asked after several moments of silence.

The other woman nodded slightly. “Yes, I’ll be very surprised if I ever come across a Rodney McKay who isn’t like him.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Actually, we did once. Rod McKay. Completely different from Rodney.”

Her other self nodded, smiling slightly, but her eyes never left the group gathered around the main console that accessed the Ancients’ database. Elizabeth glanced between them and then spoke again.

“You must be happy,” she commented. “Three ZPMs, a city virtually impervious to Wraith attack, able to contact and travel to Earth at will…”

She watched her other self stiffen slightly and finally turn her gaze away from the others. “Maybe,” she replied. “Maybe so. Everything we could ever want is now at our fingertips…”

“And yet?”

She didn’t deny that there was more. Elizabeth watched her eyes drift back to the team yet again, and barely heard her next words.

“And yet… I’d trade every bit of it to have them back.”

* * *

5\. _Almost_

“You actually continued experimenting with that stuff?” the other Rodney demanded incredulously. “Using your Stargate?! Are you all completely insane?”

Elizabeth winced. That stung, but it was true. They probably had jumped the gun a bit in the experiments with the Stargate and the Ancients’ research. She watched him open his mouth to continue berating them, but he took one look at Ronon’s dark, steady gaze and promptly changed the subject.

“Uh, well, yes… moving on,” he stuttered, eyeing the Satedan nervously. He looked down at his notes, which were scattered all over the table that dominated the briefing room. “I’ve been studying what the Ancients left behind, and I think that we can pinpoint your reality and send you home.”

“Yes,” the other Zelenka chimed in. “It will not be as difficult as it could be, since our realities are so similar.”

Elizabeth sighed with relief and glanced at her team. Rodney was stubbornly silent, glaring at his other self. John kept eyeing his own alternate self warily, as though he expected the other man to suddenly explode into a violent rage at any moment. Ronon and Teyla were also staring at their other selves.

Elizabeth fought the urge to laugh. She’d already become used to this, interacting with another version of herself. Watching the rest of them was actually a little amusing.

The meeting eventually broke up, but Elizabeth hesitated as everyone else started filing out of the room. She watched her other self deactivate her PDA, and smiled when she looked up.

“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.

Elizabeth shook her head. “No, I just wanted to thank you for your help.” She sighed. “It’s been a long road.”

The other woman eyed her. “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. Seeing so many what ifs. It must have been…”

“Amazing? Incredible?” Elizabeth supplied. She laughed wryly. “You would think so. But I’ve seen so many of them that right now I just want to see what I know to be true.”

“Home is where the heart is,” her alternate self said, nodding. She hesitated for a moment, but then asked, “What… What was it like? How different?”

Elizabeth remembered shattered windows, broken consoles, bloodstains. She remembered people with familiar faces but who were also essentially strangers. She remembered seeing and speaking to people who should have been dead. She remembered someone having all the power to protect this city, but no one to share that miracle with.

“It’s… more than I can possibly describe,” she said. “Seeing what could have been… there are some lines that just shouldn’t be crossed.”

The other woman nodded, her eyes distant. As Elizabeth moved to leave the conference room, she couldn’t help but stop and say, “Although, one alternate reality did leave some food for thought. Being Jack O’Neill’s ex-wife isn’t something I thought could ever happen.”

She walked out of the door at that point and all she heard behind her was, “What?”


End file.
